RancherOS small POC design considerations

RancherOS
1

I am new to Rancher and containers. I would like to use 10+ older PCs to build a small Rancher cluster for the purpose of learning Rancher and later possibly moving some internal only workloads to it. I also want to consider running Ceph on each PC (similar to Proxmox). The PCs are HP 8000 SFF from 2011 and have 1=1Gb nic, 1=160GB HD, 4GB=RAM, and an Intel
proc. They will connect to a L2 network switch where VLANs could be used. I was thinking of installing RancherOS from iso on a small partition /dev/sda1 and use the rest of drive on /dev/sda2 for Ceph or other storage.

How much space should be reserved for RancherOS and Rancher Server use?

Should each PC connect to the switch by a single VLAN, or should they trunk to switch so different VLANs can be used for data, control, etc?

Will this work on a private LAN behind a firewall, where container public IPs are non routable 172.25.x.y addresses?

Thanks for any feedback you are able to provide:)

Dale Sykora

2

Nothing to do with your question but might be something you should be aware of. At the most recent Rancher meetup (last week) it was mentioned that RancherOS is not yet a great choice for Rancher v2 (there’s some K8s issues). So if you are intending to use Rancher v2.x you might want to have a chat with your Rancher account manager if you have one to find out when those RancherOS issues will be ironed out.

3

There is actually no need to install RancherOS. You can add a cloud-config to the iso, using Iso Magic or similar tool.